5 Things You Need To Know About The Can-Spam Act

With the amount of information on the internet, it is your responsibility, and yours alone, to know what your responsibilities are when it comes to marketing through email campaigns.

Dating back to 2003, the CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) made sure that when it came to email marketing, you CANNOT-SPAM.

It has been very effective in ridding the internet of innumerable amounts of Spammers since its passing. Fines have been issued, assets have been seized, companies have been shut down, and people have even gone to prison. Don’t let this be you!

And you don’t really need to worry as long as you have a soul. You don’t want to Spam people anyway, but we don’t want any accidents, so this is what you need to be aware of:

No misleading or fake informative headers, including the “From” and “To” fields.

No misleading or deceptive subject lines. This is bad business sense anyway because this proves to your “potential customer” that you are not a trustworthy source.

Your messages must be labeled as advertising. This just means that you must make sure that whoever you send your emails to knows that you are sending them out as recommendations. That is what I use on my email list and it works like you wouldn’t believe.

The emails must have an “internet based” opt out method in all of the emails. That means no, “send us a stamped envelope to opt out.” Don’t worry though because almost all reputable autoresponders automatically do this for you.

Your emails must include your real business or home address (or a P.O. box). It must be a physical address. This provides accountability, and it helps to show to your customers that you are a real and legitimate business.

Now I’m not saying that everybody who breaks these laws is going to get caught, because some people just slip through the cracks (it isn’t a perfect world that we live in). However, I am saying that whoever is breaking these laws is running a huge risk or losing their business, and possibly bankrupting themselves through Spamming.

I can’t reiterate this enough that these are rules that you reallyreally REALLY want to follow, because the internet can charge you upwards of $11,000 PER VIOLATION!! You do not want that; but you do not have to really worry about that as long as you make sure that you work online with good ethics.

If you want to learn more tips and tricks about how to become a successful email marketer, then you should take a look at this blog at http://getpaidovertheinternet.wordpress.com/